In Anna Magdalena’s books, suites, minuets, miniature marches, and polonaises offered “spiritual refreshment,” to use J.S. Bach’s term from the preface to his solo keyboard partitas, two of which he copied out at the beginning of the book for his second wife.24 This turn of phrase suggests the “aesthetic hedonism” that Eric Reimer associates with the sphere of eighteenth-century amateur music making.25
Personal pleasure is not the only item on the agenda, however, and much of the significance of Anna Magdalena’s music books is missed if they are viewed solely in terms of female deprofessionalization and containment. The appearance of the chorales “Gib dich zufrieden” (13a and 13b) and “Dir, dir, Jehovah, will ich singen” (39a) suggests that Anna Magadalena’s musical practice possessed spiritual significance, perhaps for the entire family.26 The newfangled vogue for galanterie playing mingled in her music books with older traditions of Lutheran Hausmusik, in an apparently harmonious coupling of secular and sacred.27 In addition to their religious aspect, the books probably fostered Anna Magdalena’s activities as teacher and composer: her authorship of some of the anonymous pieces cannot be proved, but it is unfortunate that the possibility is never even mooted in the Neue Bach Ausgabe; and insofar as the books include pieces by children of the Bach household, they suggest, rather paradoxically, that Anna Magdalena fostered the professionalization of her sons and stepsons.28
Later collections published for women recall the Anna Magdalena Bach books in their layering of fashionable dances and piety (an intriguing constellation depending on the complex cultural work undertaken by “the feminine”). Wenkel interspersed his offering of dances with pious odes addressing God and nature, inscribing woman’s role in the home as guardian of morality. The proliferation of what Johann Adam Hiller called galanterie (minuets, rondos, and polonaises) epitomized the lamented ascendance of fashionable, French taste.29 The contents of Wenkel’s first volume of Clavierstücke für Frauenzimmer (1768) were just the sort of thing to make serious-minded north German critics such as Hiller blanch: “Singode; Polonaise; Menuet I; Menuet II; Bußlied; Menuet I; Menuet II; Polonaise; Singode; Menuet I; Menuet II; Marche; Menuet I; Menuet II; Polonaise; Menuet I; Menuet II; Polonaise; Singode; Menuet I; Menuet II; Polonaise; Wiegenlied; Polonaise; Angloise; Menuet I; Menuet II; Polonaise; Fuga [à 2 in 3/8].” Such an inventory attests to the discursive alignment of fashion, luxury, and the feminine in eighteenth-century consumerism. Indeed, in the context of woman’s official withdrawal from production and labor, the terms “woman” and “luxury” achieved a degree of synonymity.30 For Rousseau, it was woman who led man into alienating luxury and ancien régime decadence. Such associations rendered woman a potential threat to nationhood (a point Reichardt specifically addressed in his Wiegenlieder). This threat was not lessened by the cosmopolitan gloss of Wenkel’s collection, which embraced the local color of the polonaise, the angloise, and the ultimately French minuet. Works with German designations (such as Singode, Bußlied, and Wiegenlied) punctuate and frame the collection, so that a north German identification is not completely lost. The concluding fugue, in particular, points toward more serious musical practices, though the two-part texture and 3/8 meter render this more a learned topic or gesture within a diversionary collection than a genuine contrapuntal culmination.
The reception of music “for the fair sex” was not free of dissent about the veracity of these alignments of woman and fashion. In a review of Wenkel’s first collection Hiller undermined the credibility of the dedication to ladies, claiming that as many gentlemen as ladies shared the preference for galanterie. Inquiring why Wenkel had omitted works in difficult keys, Hiller suggested that composers sought to pass off mediocre and insubstantial works with the dedication to ladies.31 As an instance of resistant critical reception, Hiller’s remarks (published in a major German journal) should not be underestimated.32
THE LIMITS OF FEMALE IMPROVEMENT
In a German context, female accomplishments, though undoubtedly signs of gentility and status, were strenuously connected to education. Female art practices were thus linked even more directly than in England to Enlightenment discourses of self-improvement. In fact, there is no equivalent term in German for “accomplishment” in this English sense. Instead, music belonged to a realm of Bildung (improvement or education).
Nonetheless, this “improvement” resembled “accomplishment” in the limits it set upon female development. Richard Leppert’s contention that the principal function of the accomplishments was female “containment” is borne out by music for the fair sex that worked toward the production of “an ideologically correct species of woman.”33 The primacy of women’s duties in the family is kept in view by song texts that dwell upon courtship, marriage, and mothering, though that emphasis probably made singing not just acceptable but also meaningful in this historical moment, when music for music’s sake was no more an issue than was full female equality. The inclusion of songs and simple keyboard pieces in women’s journals such as Amaliens Erholungsstunden, Frauenzimmer-Almanach, and Leipziger Taschenbuch für Frauenzimmer is indicative of the contradictory role of musical accomplishment in relation to Enlightenment discourses of self- improvement and education as they were hesitantly applied to women. With a few exceptions, these periodicals represented only a superficial application of the rhetoric of personal improvement, since they discouraged education for women as a means of purely personal development. As Sabine Schumann has observed, the new literary genre of women’s journals responded to and propagated the notion of improvement and development for women, and “the literary housewife [became] a favorite image.” But female improvement was policed by the publications that fostered it. As Schumann wrote: “A hostile attitude to women and the Enlightenment is undoubtedly present. . . . ‘Female accomplishment’ (Bildung), an oft heard catch phrase of the period, permitted women only so much development as would transform them from simple housekeepers to cultivated housewives, without their transgressing the domestic sphere. The truly erudite woman, an equal of men, was an extremely odd idea at this time.”34 At worst, the accomplishments were a means of erasing the perceived menace of female nature with a series of predictable and thus manageable behaviors. An essay in the Monatsschrift für Damen of 1787 described women as a menace, a danger, by nature unfathomable. Only through instruction could her God-given positive characteristics be developed, only then would she become “sanftmüthig, furchtsam, gefällig, mitleidig” (gentle, timid, pleasant, sympathetic).35 Paradoxically, if predictably, self-improvement and education were the means to more effective control—a vivid illustration of Foucault’s thesis of education as a disciplinary technology.36
A conduct book by Andreas Meier from 1771 spelled out this highly qualified application of an Enlightenment rhetoric of improvement and related the accomplishments specifically to the class- and status-signifying practices that fell to woman in the home rather than to issues of purely personal development.37 Meier rejected the extremes of a young woman’s either learning nothing but housework or straying into the realm of masculine learning: “If the first is her husband’s maid, the second is a fool who wants to rule him with her knowledge.”38 The balance Meier sought to strike was one in which a wife possessed sufficient education to distinguish her from the lower order of maid but not so much that she would break the frame of female knowledge and start discussing “Wolf or Newton” with her husband.39 Indeed, for those living in the country and small towns he deemed a knowledge of sewing, embroidery, and housekeeping sufficient.40 But he saw the need for greater accomplishment for those living in larger towns. Here Meier recommended “Kentnisse der Geschichte und Geographie” (knowledge of history and geography), “Musik [und] Zeichnen” (music and drawing), and “eine zierliche und angenehme Schreibart” (a dainty and pleasant style of handwriting).41 That is, he recommended those accomplishments that enhance polite society (the writing of invitations, conversation, the entertainment of song).
These broader issues of female cultivation and its limits bear directly upon the practice of music. Meier recommended music to the fair sex with particular
